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I've got every other revision of the GCN GPUs running on the OSS stack without issue, with OpenGL3.3 working, full video playback acceleration etc. Everything from the HD8210 on up to the 280. So tell me, what game with a proper port on Linux that is out today needs anythin faster then the 280? 4K doesn't work on Linux at all and lower end GPUs already handle 1920x1200 perfectly.

That is another bad excuse (btw i don't hear that excuse from devs). I can understand 295X2 does not work (completely) but even that should work with one chip .

To be honest, i dont have a need even for that 280 and i know radeon work fine most of the time on most other chips, but i also know most people simply does not need dedicated cards so nothing more then Kabini/Kaveri . And i tend to think those APUs are best supported in the opensource driver .

That said most gamers will likely want to have anything with GDDR5 memory, that is enough. Next step are cards with more shaders and bus width 256/384/512.

So this HAWAII is nothing but BONAIRE as i understand, but with more shaders and 512 bus width... so i don't see a single reason (other than these techincal problems in driver development) to not supporting it . Who knows, maybe this has something to do with not so common 512 bus width on Deskop GPUs, not sure if regs/firmwares need to handle that somehow .

i spent a year putting up with a pitiful gaming experience on a 5850 and yet even with all my steam games i refused to go back to windows even on a dual boot. windows at home isnt viable anymore, its too insecure, drm littered, expensive and bloaty, not to mention poor to customise, worse in operation, feel and speed... yup bascially everthing apart from GPU drivers. Then i had a lot more success with a Trinity AMD APU and for a number of months played on most games with frame rates between 20-40fps and with vsync working ok from time to time (only on the opensource driver!). In the end I just bought a GTX760 Nvidia card and apart from vsync not working on some titles im now getting around 60 - 200fps in most of the games (300fps cap in TF2) i play @ 1080p with 4x AA and 8x Aniso + high/utra settings. For under $200 it is a no brainer.

I also tried a 750ti maxewell which was an exellent card for the budget price on performance, enery and cooling. I only got shut because i wanted more and was being greedy

So, really i am one of the people who has suffered the longest with AMD cards and whats worse i even a friend of mine who is a long time windows user to try out linux recently swaping from windows 8 after he saw my OS setup he knew it was better than windows. Sadly his 290x crashed the desktop so much he ended up back on win8 and will probably now stay there for a very long time.

im not a typical nvidia fan, i dont like their marketing or ring fencing of technologies or their lack of a decent FOSS driver but in the end im now gaming at the same or in some cases faster than windows 8 on a free linux desktop and thats what i will advise people to buy from now on.

So this HAWAII is nothing but BONAIRE as i understand, but with more shaders and 512 bus width... so i don't see a single reason (other than these techincal problems in driver development) to not supporting it . Who knows, maybe this has something to do with not so common 512 bus width on Deskop GPUs, not sure if regs/firmwares need to handle that somehow .

The relationship between a hawaii and bonaire is similar to tahiti and pitcairn. The main difference as noted is the bandwidth and number of shader cores and RBs. Programming-wise, they are the same which is why this bug has been so problematic.

Say thanks to nvidia with their "the way it's meant to be played" stuff. Fglrx follows specs more closely than nvidia but developers just don't care (see for example recent commits to mesa where Marek made quirks for Unigine software which do not follow specs but "just works" on nvidia).

Use fglrx. It just works. I've been using fglrx for more than 5 years and it worked most of the time. Yes, there are certain problems but at least it never crashed my kernel at random times.

Tell me moar about it. I have 9600GT m in a laptop and you know what? Nvidia has only legacy support for it. Moreover there are kernel crashes from time to time which appeared some time ago and which nvidia is not going to fix anyways (there was a lengthy thread in nvidia's forum).

So all your facts are the same as MS's "get the facts".

I just tested nouveau again solely because of this comment, same GPU, without blobbed FW this time
My performance in portal2 is now comparable to nvidia's driver (slightly worse), due to default high clocks
Maybe it's time for modifying VBIOS before attempting honest benchmark? At least for the NV50

Meanwhile, some people will swear up and down AMD's drivers caused their GPU to explode or some bs whenever they touched the GPU with a screwdriver or intentionally overvolted/clocked it.

Umm -- the power management on the OS drivers still causes at least some chipsets to get WAAAAY too hot. I mean as in uncomfortable to touch your laptop near your heat exhaust. It turns your laptop essentially into a mini-space heater and/or noisemaker from the sound of the system fans. This happens even if you have a USB cooling platform hooked up BTW.

I deeply applaud AMD for their OS efforts and focus on buying their products because of it. But lets not pretend that things are hunky dory and that there aren't real issues with the drivers that can necessarily damage your system.

I just tested nouveau again solely because of this comment, same GPU, without blobbed FW this time
My performance in portal2 is now comparable to nvidia's driver (slightly worse), due to default high clocks
Maybe it's time for modifying VBIOS before attempting honest benchmark? At least for the NV50

I would definitely switch to open drivers but there are certain problems. First, this is a laptop. Second, the GPU I have (GT 9600M) is really very-very hot even while using nvidia driver. So I'm not sure how safe it would be to use nouveau since it has obvious problems with power management.

PTHERM has other means to downclock GPU, and AFAIK it has the same settings as nvidia blob
And nvidia blob manages to get temperatures over 110°C (no dust, fresh paste, compal JHL90) . Idle temperature is just 15°C higher on nouveau, power consumption is probably much bigger issue
Also i have noticed that nvidia somehow has memory leaks and uses way more cpu/ram… I just hope to reach 14 days uptime again
(About my portal2 testing: i forgot to test any valve maps … and fps drops noticeably there to almost unplayable level)

Note that the 7790 is supposed to be GCN 1.0 while 260X is supposed to be GCN 1.1 which is quite contradictory with the above information... Maybe the 7790 was like a GCN 1.1 prototype... The 7790 was released 14 months after the first 7000 series cards and only 7 months before the first 200 series cards.

7790 was always GCN 1.1, and yes, it was the prototype they used to test yields of the architecture.